Exploring data conditions to improve business performance

Abstract

Past researches drew from the industrial organization perspective have examined the role of the data to generate competitive advantage. Their analysis show data is a valuable resource that can leverage business partnerships, vertical integration, or diversification. The emergence of data science has created new opportunities to understand better clients’ needs and to manage more efficiently the organizations’ processes. Nevertheless, if data analytics represent an enormous potential, many organizations are still looking the conditions to obtain value from them. Our study contributes to this topical subject analysing the relationship between different combinations of data conditions and the company performance that we measure through the Customer management and Provider operations efficiency. Our methodology is novel compared to previous researches which are based in linear algebra. It is based on the use of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) which allows to reveal multiple paths to achieve the possible outcomes. Our results show that the consistency, completeness, and protection of the data along with a data-driven company profile are different possible solutions to a better Customer management and Provider operations efficiency. Our conclusions allow practitioners to uncover the strength of the data in the hopes of solving many of their business performance concerns.

Keywords:

• data science
• competitive analytics
• qualitative comparative analysis
• business performance

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Marc Torrent, Director at Big Data Center of Excellence Barcelona and Circe Serra, Senior project manager at Eurecat for their support in providing data, information and contacts throughout this project. Eurecat is the most important technology centre in Catalonia, offering innovation solutions to boost competitiveness of industrial and services Catalan companies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.camerdata.es

2 https://www.camerdata.es